Career Management is strategy, jobs are tactics

Career management is boring. Seriously, for as much written about career management, people don’t act on the writing. You might read about career management, but when was the last time you did anything more than think about your career?

Jobs, however, you will act on. You go to work, plow (or plod) through the day, figure out how to survive on the job, and figure out how to make the next move to the next department or job or gig. You have to wade through office politics, bad bosses, clueless management, great people, obstructionists, corporate speak, great management, and carefully try to figure out how long this job you have will last.

Career management is strategy

The problem with career management is that there are no clear goals associated with it. “Find your passion!” “Do the work you love!” “Make your next big career move!”

Meh.

Here’s the Cube Rules definition of career management: work to gain employment security. Having employment security means that you can navigate the treacherous waters of working on the job — even if you are laid off, get a bad manager, your company goes under, or you can’t stand the people you work with and decide to leave you will be able to land that next gig. And, yes, you might find that the work you do is also the work you love, but finding the work you love doesn’t mean you get employment security. Just doing work you love.

Getting to employment security means you need strategy — do you have the right job skills to continue finding work? Do you have the job performance to go along with it to show results? Do you have a business network to tap to know other positions available? Do you know how to do all phases of a job search? And do you have the finances that allows you to take a job that fits your working style and not just any job that comes along?

Jobs are tactical

If you leave school with anything other than a specific degree (like Nursing, or Accounting, or Law), chances are, you took a job from some company that gave you an offer. Now, you might have purposely interviewed with companies that you thought you wanted to work with and later in a career targeted a specific job type, but a lot of job stuff is just…accidental. Your business network tells you of an opening, you’re ticked off at your current manager/company/coworker/working conditions and you go and interview for it. You get the job and that’s that. Right?

But that doesn’t help you get to employment security. It doesn’t even really get you any job security. It’s just another job.

You need the strategy of career management and the tactical jobs to carry out your strategy

Every few months, you need to check the employment security hierarchy to see what you can do in your job to help your quest for employment security. And when you take a job, one of the items for consideration is how that job will help build your employment security.

They go hand in hand.

And you are really going it alone. If you don’t do the strategy and the tactics, no one will do it for you. You don’t think a corporation will do that for you, do you?

About the Author

Scot Herrick is the author of “I’ve Landed My Dream Job–Now What???” and owner of Cube Rules, LLC. Scot has a long history of management and individual contribution in multiple Fortune 100 corporations.

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